From Indiana to Neverland: Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson’s death yesterday at the age of 50 has set off a media wave of tributes, remembrances, debates, and historical-legacy conversations comparable to what we saw in the wake of Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, and John Lennon’s departures. He’s earned his place in that pantheon, I’d say; there’s no other performer I can think of from the 1970s and 80s who had such a hold on the popular imagination. The “King of Pop” moniker is deserved, too, when you think about the string of hits he had stretching all the way from the early days of the Jackson 5 to his last mega-selling release, the 1991 CD Dangerous. His solo records Off the Wall and Thriller were ubiquitous when I was growing up… whether you liked the music or not (and I liked quite a lot of the music off those two albums), it were omnipresent in a way I don’t think I’ve heard since.

Then there was video. In the days when cable TV was not yet a standard part of everybody’s household, I remember traipsing with friends through cold and snow to a local pizza parlor to see the world premiere of “Thriller” on MTV; it was that much of an event. Jackson not only broke the network’s racial barrier, he shaped much of the culture of the 1980s in the image of MTV. (It’s fairly safe to say that he’ll be remembered as much for his visual appeal as he will be for his music.) His private obsessions and foibles, the stuff of tabloid delight for so long, added to his strange mystique. It wasn’t so much that Jackson was larger than life, it was that he seemed removed from life; as blogger Josh Marshall observes, much of the singer’s personal and professional existence, in one way or another, was an attempt to defy reality, which is why his death seems all the more shocking.

This is generally a jazz blog, and Jackson has no immediate ties to jazz beyond his relationship with producer Quincy Jones, but his fame and his cultural import pretty much overwhelm any conversational boundaries. It really does feel like an Elvis moment, and the rough parallels are there--overwhelming early fame and impressive, widely influential artistic accomplishments, followed by a long, protracted decline and increasingly bizarre and reclusive behavior, concluding abruptly with middle-aged death (and perhaps, in Jackson’s case, partly drug-related, as Elvis’ was). Like Presley, Jackson lived out an American dream and an American nightmare. Peter Guralnick’s two-volume Elvis biography is by turns exhilarating, harrowing, and ultimately tedious (not the writing, but the story of Presley’s final descent itself)--a comprehensive portrait of fame’s grotesque distortions, as well as the evolution of a singular talent.

There’s another American icon who comes to mind--actor and fellow Hoosier James Dean. One biography of Dean was called The Mutant King, a title that seems to invoke Jackson’s eventual fate. Two boys from Indiana, dogged and driven in one way or another by childhood pain, who reinvented themselves, and in so doing reinvented millions in their likeness. Dean’s journey ended at age 24, the same age Michael Jackson was when he hit his artistic and commercial peak with Thriller (an album rife with some of the same anxiety of late adolescence and the panic of early adulthood that shows up in Dean’s work). If Jackson had died then, or even just a few years later, we’d surely be remembering him in a different, less complicated way than we are today--and who’s to say that Dean wouldn’t have pursued his own bizarre paths of behavior as he aged? (Some think Dean’s portrayal of the older, power-corrupted Jett Rink in his final movie Giant might have proved to be prophetic.)

Consider, too, the humble origins of both Dean and Jackson. Fairmount, Dean’s hometown, still exists, but the kind of farming community that it represents is rapidly vanishing. Gary, the lost city of steel from which Jackson came, casts an image of shadow and ruin these days. These places, both industrial and rural, gave birth to two of America’s most iconic stars, each with an almost-unworldly charisma, a brilliant array of performer gifts, a highly-creative drive, and a deep-seated need to be loved--in Dean’s case more overt, more vulnerable. With Jackson the signs became obvious later in life, but in some ways they were there all along.

Last night CNN played a clip of Jackson in his childhood performing days, saying “Everything that I sing I mean.” A friend of mine heard “I’ll Be There” on the radio this morning and pointed out to me that the selfless, nearly-transcendental love that Jackson’s singing about in that song probably existed for him only within the song itself. And so he surely meant it, even if he seemed to be singing songs about more mature, sexual/romantic relationships of which he undoubtedly had little or no experience. For Jackson they were something else--testaments to an inner dream, and a means of eliciting another kind of love: the love of fans. That love grew bigger and bigger, and then it began to ebb away, partly from the natural shifts and erosions of musical fashion, partly helped along by Jackson’s personal troubles. At the same time Jackson was growing older, moving farther away from whomever that boy had been who could put across a song like “I’ll Be There” with such belief and conviction; moving farther away, perhaps, from the only real childhood friend he’d ever had.

Michael Jackson changed the landscape of American pop culture--a feat the scale of which we may never see again in our lifetimes. Sadly, the culture changed him, too; the man in the mirror, lost in the funhouse, unable to find what he’d never had in the first place, and more and more desperate in his attempts to do so. Can you imagine being blessed with such talent, feeling so bereft of childhood love, and then becoming one of the most powerful entertainment figures in the world, able to have whatever you wish? I’m sure building Neverland didn’t make him happy in the end either, failed to solve the equation of loneliness; it’s almost impossible not to think of Citizen Kane and its protagonist, with his ever-spiraling constructions of grandiosity that can never compensate for the growing hole in his soul. Did Michael Jackson even have a Rosebud? Or were the last 20 years of his life a sad and futile attempt to invent one? I don’t want to suggest a celebrity parable here. I only want to acknowledge and respect the final, frail humanity of the boy who sang “Ben,” beaten by his father… the young man who mesmerized millions with his flights of song and dance… and even the strange, possibly predatory older adult who had to eventually realize that he, too, was caught in the gently merciless web of time.

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